Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 88290 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88290 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
He shook his head. “No. Another man, their driver, who we did not have eyes on, who wasn’t at the party, was delivered this afternoon to Diego Huerta, who runs the Colima cartel in Sinaloa, with a message to not come after Hannah Kage or her family again.”
“The man was here in Chicago last night?” Sam asked.
“Correct.”
“And was delivered, this morning, to Huerta in Mexico?”
“Midafternoon, but yes,” O’Meara said, sounding defeated.
“Was he alive?”
“He was, but we thought, knowing Huerta, that he wouldn’t be long for the world. Huerta is not the kind of man who accepts failure well.”
“What do you mean, you thought?”
“Well, Huerta got a call from someone ten minutes after his man arrived home and has, as of now, called off any and all vengeance against your daughter, and the man who delivered the message was sent home to Nuevo León.”
Sam was quiet, just sitting there.
“So is my daughter in danger?” I asked the question again, breaking the silence.
“No,” Salazar told me. “Stafford confirmed that all the chatter that the DEA has heard confirms that she is no longer a person of interest to the cartel.”
“Because they feel she’s guarded?” I prodded.
“Three men were killed with such surgical precision that the other people at the party didn’t know they were dead at first,” Mabe explained to me.
“And their driver, the driver of the hit men, he was then kidnapped and put on a plane by whoever killed his friends,” I said, trying to make logical sense of what I’d heard. “Is that right?”
O’Meara nodded, looking truly miserable now.
“And then once he got home, the sniper, we’re assuming, called this Huerta and said, hey, listen, leave Hannah Kage alone, and the driver, since he didn’t do anything wrong, would you please just let him go home as well.”
All four of them were looking at me with deadpan expressions, but it wasn’t my fault. This was the story we’d been given.
“That’s it, right? That’s the whole thing?”
O’Meara’s sigh was long. “Yes.”
“Well, so what is it you want to know at this point? If my husband talked to Colonel Colter, right?”
“Yes,” O’Meara answered.
I turned to Sam.
“No, I did not,” he answered me. “The colonel and I are not friends. You can ask Ian Doyle when you call him in D.C. if he spoke to the colonel. But I would suggest, as I said to you, as you saw from my reaction to your news, that neither my deputy director, nor myself, knew of this threat on Hannah’s life. If I had, I would have put her into protective custody or had her move in with my friend Aaron Sutter until the threat was over.”
“Oh, you could ask Aaron too,” I suggested, trying to be helpful. “Aaron has the means to hire someone who could assassinate the men sent to kill his goddaughter.”
Sam nodded in agreement. “You could check with him. I don’t think he knew either, and I wanna say he’s in Helsinki or something. I think he’s back this weekend, though.”
“I know,” I offered. “You could ask Commander Stiel if he knows if Aaron contacted a hit man or something.”
Sam was shaking his head at me.
“What?”
“Nobody says hit man. The correct vernacular is contract killer.”
“Oh, okay. Contract killer,” I amended. “But you could ask Duncan.”
“Sure,” Sam agreed.
There was a long silence.
“Your testimony is that you knew nothing about the men contracted to kill your daughter,” Hall summed up like she wanted to be anywhere but in our living room.
“Correct,” Sam told them.
“And no one you know killed the men contracted to kill your daughter.”
“Correct again.”
“If there’s a connection, Chief Deputy, we will find it.”
Sam never responded to threats, and his bored sigh made it clear that he wasn’t intimidated in the least. “I suggest that you’re wasting time and taxpayer money but––”
The knock on the door stopped us.
I got up again, Sam holding Dobby so there would be no more barking, and when I got to the door and opened it, there was George Hunt looking utterly crisp and polished in a black Prada suit that made an already handsome man, simply stunning.
“Good evening, Mr. Harcourt,” he said in greeting. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” I said, stepping aside so he could walk by. “Should I get you a chair?”
“No, I won’t be here long. Hannah has a thing at the ballet tonight, a fundraising event for them, so I’m on my way to pick her up.”
“I thought you were deployed.”
“I was. Just got back,” he said, yawning as he and I reached the living room. “This morning. I’m still jet-lagged.”
“Mr. Hunt,” O’Meara said, standing up, Hall right there beside him. “Did you kill––”
“Here,” he said, pulling a business card from the breast pocket of his suit and passing it to O’Meara. “That is General Ladesma’s aide, and if you have questions about where I was, they can be directed there. Don’t screw around with him, though, he has absolutely no sense of humor, and if you piss him off—I just wouldn’t, is all.”